Top 10 Tips, Tools & ToDos for Local SEO

Written by: Jason Bayless | August 08, 2017

Local SEO is a must-do item for today’s small businesses. Without it, finding success becomes much harder. This article includes ten techniques, ideas and action items that can help decision makers excel at local SEO.

1. Actually Be Local

Companies need a physical address in the locale where they want to compete. Google and the other search engines value businesses that are verifiably local to their searchers. Search spiders seek data that demonstrates a business’s location. A commercial outfit should share address and contact information on multiple pages on its website.

2. Persist

Some business folks believe that one can just set and forget SEO. Successful online marketers pursue better search engine optimization everyday. Google’s spiders do not crawl sites as soon as they are uploaded or changed. Be patient while awaiting search-engine results page updates, and improve SEO aspects regularly.

3. Become a Keyword Expert

When Google and other search engines scan a site, they sort keyword phrases. Since the start of this century, oodles of articles have been posted online about keywords. Short keywords in a niche are typically the toughest to dominate. One needs to research long keyword-phrases. Google’s Keyword Planner significantly helps with that task.

4. Dominate a Niche

Find a prime niche, and target the top position on Google for each of its busiest keywords. Do this with no more than five niches. Focus on those. Once each is dominated, add five niches.

5. Use Copyscape

Search-engine companies expect unique content, and their tools penalize sites that are full of copied or unoriginal content. To ensure that a site’s pages are original, use Copyscape, a site that scans for duplicate content and guards against plagiarism.

6. Dive Deep

Businesses should commit to deploying more local-optimization items than they imagine their competitors might. This thorough source can help with that commitment. It is a spreadsheet that lists 300 tools and methods for crushing SEO.

7. Analyze and Act

People are analytical, but analysis can cause inaction. Dominating a niche requires action. Plenty has been written about analysis of sites’ content. While analysis is important, businesses must act more than they analyze. Commit to adding content and gaining links to that content on a massive schedule. If one’s schedule does not allow a large time commitment to local-SEO improvements, turn to a company that specializes in online marketing.

8. Optimize Site Speed

At the internet’s dawn, people understood when sites took minutes to load. Today’s website visitor expects instant access. Businesses can check load times and other factors that affect the user experience with Pingdom.

9. See What Google Sees

BrowSEO reveals how Google’s spiders see a given site. Businesses can use this information to revise pages and produce layouts that the spiders will more easily interpret.